


Wraps Around Our Collective Heart

by wearenotsaints



Series: holding us together [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Liam and Louis are dead, M/M, Multi, Niall Zayn and Harry arent, OT5, am I a horrible person?, this is how I think they'd deal, yet another sad thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 17:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearenotsaints/pseuds/wearenotsaints
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Pain. Oblivion. Waking. Pain again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. There is no longer any semblance of in between.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>or more of what happens when two out of five die and the other three have to go on living</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wraps Around Our Collective Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Continuation of The String In Our Bones. Can be read before or after though it does take place before the events of the other. Please R&R as feedback beings me endless joy.  
> Cheers!

Harry rolls over and away from Zayn's sleep heavy arm. Stares up at the ceiling till his eyes burn. He blames his actions on the lack of air conditioning, but that's not the case. Hasn't been, as much as Harry tries to pass it off as such. His skin _hurts_ ; feels tight over his bones and he can't stomach the slightest bit of contact.

Four Days; it's been Four Days and Harry keeps waking up with no memory of it, only for reality to slam him back into the mattress moments later. He doesn't know what's worse: the forgetting, or the remembering. He figures he'll never sort it out. It's all worse. Every waking moment, and the sleeping ones as well. Unless he's dosed himself heavily enough with a handful of the pain pills Simon's personal physician prescribed the three of them. Harry's life has been boiled down to

Pain

Oblivion

Waking

Pain again

_Wash. Rinse. Repeat._

There is no longer any semblance of in between.

+

"You have to go on," Management tells them 13 Days After, "You should. It's what Lo--" And Harry's out of his seat and through the double meeting room doors before the names can drop from their lips like grenades. In the hallway, he plants a trembling hand against the stucco wall to steady himself, body shaking; anger and sorrow culminating in his bones.

"I can't. I can't. **I. Can't**." He mutters, eyes squeezed shut against the emotional onslaught.

"Ya don't 'aft to. Sit down, Harry," Paul's accent slices through the phantoms and his large hands are solid on Harry's shoulders as Paul guides him to the floor. "Shh, breathe, Harry. Breathe," Paul continues, cupping Harry's jaw, but it's not helping; Harry can't get enough air in. He knows a panic attack even if he's never had one, "Follow mah lead Styles, or y'll pass out. In, out, in, out."

Harry's gasps die off, his lungs expand and keep his heart beating in spite of himself. The tears come next, because this isn't the norm; usually it's Liam in Paul's place and Niall in his, and it won't ever be like that again. Because Liam is dead and Louis is too and "Fuck. Fuck. **Fuck** ," Harry chants until Paul wraps him up in a hug and says nothing else.

+

"Our condolences"

"In these trying times"

"We are truly sorry for your loss"

_Condolences; trying times; sorrysorrysorry; your loss, your loss, Your. Loss._

Harry reads over the words until they blur. Listens to the sad, sympathetic noises that accompany the testimonials of pity through the tinny speakers of his phone, and scoffs. Because this loss isn't his alone. He has to share it. Divide it up between Zayn, Niall and himself. Their musical band and crew. The fans. _The world_.

Yet the majority of it--this palpable loss--the melancholy and rage and questioning, belongs to Louis and Liam's families.

"How are you, love?" Jay asks on the 27th Day and Harry only answered because he multiplied his own grief by some infinite number to try and calculate hers.

"Breathing," Harry responds, voice cracking and he doesn't want this. To hear her. To be reminded that his own pain can't begin to compare.

"Well that's something, innit?" Jay answers, something like a smile, small but there all the same, in her remark. Harry can picture her in the kitchen of the Doncaster house; preparing lunches for her daughters-- _her remaining children_ , Harry reminds himself-- while the newest set of twins, hardly five months old, sleep upstairs in the nursery. He wonders if she can look at Ernest without seeing Louis. Wonders how she deals with having only one son again after adjusting to a few months with two, "The girls keep asking after you. Want to know when you'll visit."

"Oh?" Harry breathes out sharply, like it's been punched out of him and he doesn't say "soon" because he can't lie to her. Jay doesn't deserve that and neither do the girls. Harry just doesn't think he could stand going up there, surrounding himself with them, immersing himself in their lives so soon After. Because Louis is there in the soft crinkles by the corners of Fizzy's eyes; the freckles across the slope of Phoebe's nose; in Charlotte's bubble gum tinged laugh, and the bones of Daisy's nimble hands. He knows that even the babies will hold something of Louis Harry wouldn't be able to ignore. The thought of it, the possibility that seeing them would remind him of how they're the only remaining pieces of Lou this world has left, is enough to leave his mouth dry. Throat working uselessly as the pressure constricts his windpipe.

"Just know the offer always stands, Hazza," Jay's voice cuts through his morbid, disjointed thoughts, as though she knows exactly what he's thinking. The way his nickname rolls off her tongue sounds so much like Louis that Harry's knuckles go white around his phone case. Almost begs her to say it again because all he's got are voicemails and clips of interviews, but none of them sound half as good--as solid and _real_ \--as when she'd breathed life into the consonants and vowels, "Don't be a stranger, sweetheart. Send Z and Niall our love, yeah?"

And Harry's sure he'll never be able to understand the full capacity of Jay's selflessness in a time when she's allowed to be anything but. So he just sends love back and goes to find his remaining bandmates before he decides to keep Jay's words for himself.

**  
  
**

+

"Have you thought of going to see someone? Ya know, to talk?" Nick asks 44 Days After. Harry is sprawled out under Nick's kitchen table, carving song lyrics into its underside with a pocket knife he found in Liam's desk.

"No," Harry says flatly, examining his latest verse from a Typhoon song about death. He runs a knuckle over it and wonders when Nick will tell him off for vandalizing his personal possessions.  The thing about having two dead bandmates ( _friendsbrothersloverspuzzlepieces_ ) is that people stop telling you "No". They tread lightly, speak softly, as though those affected by death have contracted some kind of illness. People don't want to get too close, in case death is catching.

"Well," Nick says, voice faltering, "It might help?" He's speaking in nothing but questions and Harry turns his head away from the mahogany long enough to see the toes of Nick's boots, the length of his legs to about right above his knees in those stupidly tight skinny jeans before the table top cuts off the view. Harry hums the second verse of the song and closes his eyes instead of answering. Relishes the cold of the tile against his cheek and Nick sighs but doesn't say anything else.

Harry knows Niall went to see someone, right After, and Zayn already had a therapist, who very much insisted on upping his antidepressants and Harry didn't say anything when Zayn came home, left the prescription unfilled on the kitchen counter for three weeks. Smoked pack after pack instead until Niall asked if he was trying to kill himself quicker, to catch up with the two no longer there, and Zayn promised he'd quit before locking himself in the bathroom. Harry had fucked Niall up against the kitchen cabinets, biting hard into the skin between his shoulder blades and coming without a sound, then went and filled Zayn's prescription himself. Dropped them into Zayn's tea with no real expectation that they would help. Figured they were on their own in that department. That they would be for a very, very long time.

+

"I don't know what to say to him," Greg tells Harry on his back porch 79 Days After. They're in Mullingar, have been for a handful of days now and Harry knows better than to ask when they'll be leaving. They don't have anywhere to be. No interviews or promos, concerts or signing. Their schedules have been wiped clean, indefinitely.

One Direction is officially "on hiatus".

"Ta any of ya really," Greg mumbles and Harry nods, tips the neck of his beer bottle back up to his lips and swallows so he doesn't have to say anything. Because he doesn't know either, can't give Greg any of the answers he hasn't had since a 3 AM phone call in May stole them all away. He tells Greg as much, because his brain to mouth filters been shot to shit and Greg looks at him with something like understanding and apology in the blue of his eyes. Slings his arm across Harry's shoulders and holds him against his side, reminding Harry of the quiet way older brothers love, until Theo starts wailing inside. Greg lets him go with a kiss dropped to the top of his head and Harry tries to forget the way he used to have four older brothers; how he now only has two.

+

102 Days After and it still stings when Harry wakes up in the morning. Still burns when he takes that first conscious breath, acutely aware that he's sucking in air while Liam and Louis aren't. Zayn starts out the nights in the double king they share but Harry always finds him curled up on the floor of Liam's closet every morning.

102 Days and they still haven't cleared out any of the dead's possessions. Can't bring themselves to do something so final. Niall whispered once, when Harry thinks he thought the two of them weren't paying attention, that this way they can keep up the facade that Liam and Louis will be coming back. Harry can't find it in himself to tell Niall off for being such a fucking idiot.

Maybe because he foolishly wants it to be true.

He can understand why Zayn's taken to sleeping in the closet of a dead boy. Knows how Liam's smell still lingers on his clothes and the bed sheets. Harry's kept a t-shirt of Louis' under his pillow since the first night After and though it doesn't quite smell like him anymore, Harry hasn't switched it out for another. Likes the idea that there are dressers full of clothes that still do. A small insurance against the passing of time.

They give Eleanor a box of Louis' things because it would have been selfish not to. They aren't the only ones who loved him and even if Harry had to go back through it a few times to make sure he could really part with the contents before Zayn slapped his hands away and taped the lid shut, he figures they owe her that much. She hugs them each with a ferocity that _hurts_ and when Niall starts to cry, she smooths her thumbs over his cheeks, crying too, and Harry thinks he can understand how Louis loved her as well. How that love didn't detract from the way he loved them but rather, added to it. Louis'd always had so much to give, Harry can't begrudge Eleanor for it.

It's different with Danielle, because she and Liam hadn't been together for almost a year before he died and Zayn screams at Harry from the top of the landing, insists that she doesn't deserve a fucking scrap, when Harry relays her request. Niall gathers up a couple button downs and a sweatshirt with her university's name emblazoned on the front, the collection of poems Liam'd written about her, and the azure mug she'd made him in her pottery class, leaves them outside her flat while Zayn smokes out the car window and Harry has his fingers curled around the dark haired boy's knee.

"He would have wanted us too." Niall says when he slides into the backseat and Zayn merely nods before flicking his cigarette filter to the pavement, his shoulders rigid throughout the drive home. He doesn't speak to either of them for the rest of the day but when Harry wakes up, Zayn is still asleep beside him, arm thrown across Niall's waist and Harry counts it as apology enough.

+

"You can always come home," Gemma reminds Harry on the 146th Day. The ocean waves are rushing across their feet as they walk along the tide line.

"I know," Harry nods, lifting his eyes to watch the way the sunlight plays with Gemma's outline against the glittering blue beyond her. And he does know, is the thing. Knows that he could head back to Holmes Chapel and curl up in his childhood bed and never leave. That his mother and sister and stepfather wouldn't judge, would just love him the best they could until he either woke up or faded out.

And maybe that's why he doesn't go back. Thinks it'd be too much like throwing in the towel on this fight he never asked to participate in. He may not want to be here, but he is. Him and the two boys racing along ahead of them, chasing each other through the surf. Reminiscent of days that feel a lifetime away.

It's the first time since After that Harry hears either Zayn or Niall laughing without trying to stifle it. Hide it behind their hands or look around, guilt lining their features, as though they've begun to believe they have no right to joy anymore.

Harry knows he's been doing the same.

Feels wrung out and exhausted from catching himself forgetting; forgetting the way Liam got a crease between his eyebrows right before he gave into the latest whimsical demand of his bandmates; forgetting the way Louis used to sit on the edge of the stage before and after a performance, observing the goings on with a quiet smile on his face; forgetting what their hands felt like on his skin; their lips pressed to his; forgetting the small things that had made him fall in love, totally and completely; forgettingforgettingforgetting.

"I can't lose them." Harry blurts suddenly, coming to a halt and curling his fingernails against his palms. Gemma stops a few feet ahead of him and her gaze is sympathetic when she turns around.

"I know, Harry. You won't. Forget I said anything," And then she's hugging him and Harry doesn't know if he needs to tell her it's not just Niall and Zayn he's talking about.

+

On the 180th Day After, Harry finds himself in the back alley of some dingy little pub, fire scorching through his chest. Or maybe it's just the whiskey he'd downed earlier. He can't tell. Doesn't know if he could even distinguish between the two. Because everything has been spiraling down to this moment.

Six months down the road from where they started and Harry can count on both hands how many of these days have been bearable; on one, how many have been good. He still misses Liam and Louis with an intensity that terrifies him, but now he's starting to miss Niall and Zayn too. Which isn't fair, because they're still here.

Breathing and living and _existing with him_.

Harry's uncertain as to how much longer that will be. His fear laces everything else and washes all the color out.

He wants certainty.

He wants a promise.

To know that this won't also slip away from his grasp.

So he steps forward, boots leaving footstep echoes on the cobblestones and pushes his-heartachingvenomlaceddesperate-self into Zayn's personal space.

 

+

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
